The Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year (nominee) To rescue her family from poverty and avoid marrying her slope-shouldered cousin, seventeen-year-old Orchid competes to be one of the Emperor's wives. When she is chosen as a lower-ranking concubine she enters the erotically charged and ritualised Forbidden City. But beneath its immaculate facade lie whispers of murders and ghosts, and the thousands of concubines will stoop to any lengths to bear the Emperor's son. Orchid trains herself in the art of pleasuring a man, bribes her way into the royal bed, and seduces the monarch, drawing the attention of dangerous foes. Little does she know that China will collapse around her, and that she will be its last Empress

The last decades of the nineteenth century were a violent period in China"s history marked by humiliating foreign incursions and domestic rebellion, ultimately ending in the demise of the Ch"ing dynasty. The only constant during this tumultuous time was the power wielded by one person: the resilient, ever-resourceful Tzu Hsi, or Empress Orchid, as readers came to know her in Anchee Min"s critically acclaimed novel covering the first part of this complex woman"s life. The Last Empress is the story of Orchid"s dramatic transition from a strong-willed, instinctive young woman to a wise and politically savvy leader. Moving from the intimacy of the concubine quarters into the spotlight of the world stage, Orchid must not only face the perilous condition of her empire but also a series of devastating personal losses, as first her son and then her adopted son succumb to early death. Yearning only to step aside, and yet growing constantly into her role, only she-allied with the progressives, but loyal to the conservative Manchu clan of her dynasty-can hold the nation"s rival factions together. Anchee Min offers a powerful revisionist portrait based on extensive research of one of the most important figures in Chinese history. Viciously maligned by the western press of the time as the "Dragon Lady," a manipulative, blood-thirsty woman who held onto power at all costs, the woman Min gives us is a compelling, very human leader who assumed power reluctantly, and who sacrificed all she had to protect those she loved and an empire that was doomed to die